2025/05/28 by José Ignacio Hualde, Ander Beristain, Ane Icardo Isasa · 2 voices
Psychology · Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Phonetics and Phonology Research #Spanish Linguistics and Language Studies #Linguistic Variation and Morphology
paper · doi:10.1093/9780191988080.003.0002
openalex publication_date 2025/05/28 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/11
Abstract This chapter examines and compares the phonology and phonetics of lexical accent in three local Basque dialects and in Standard Basque. Two of these dialects represent the two main types of pitch-accent systems found in Basque. A third one is a geographically intermediate dialect without pitch–accent contrasts. The speakers in this study are bidialectal in Standard Basque, and the effects of differences in native prosodic systems in the pronunciation of Standard Basque are also studied. Interestingly, the four Basque systems analysed here exhaust a typology defined by the presence of contrastive stress (understood as obligatory prominence) and lexically contrastive tone. It is argued that, instead, they are all better viewed as accent languages that differ in other properties, such as the contrastiveness of the location of the accent, the existence of lexically unaccented words, and the contrastiveness of accentual melodies. Phonetically, these varieties differ in the extent to which they use dimensions other than pitch to signal accentual contrasts.